Eric Mack On-Line

This week, we conclude the paperless challenge discussion by answering your questions. In case you missed the previous segments, here are links to part one, two, and three. [Update: 2/15/2006 9:30 AM: I've fixed the link to point to part four.]

Listen in as I discuss my 8-week paperless challenge with my guest, Tablet PC MVP, Tracy Hooten, of The Student Tablet PC blog. This podcast covers the various aspects of the paperless challenge, its inspiration, how we prepared for it, the tools and methodologies used and the lessons we learned. Most important, we answer the many paperless challenge questions posted to our blogs or sent to us by email over the last several months. Paperless Challenge Discussion topics: Inspiration and objectives for the paperless challenge Preparation: hardware & software Tools and methodologies Surprising discoveries Tips, tricks, and best practices Lessons learned Recommendations And most important, answers to your questions

Our podcast ran longer than anticipated so I've split the podcast up into segments for your convenience. Here's the third segment. I'll post the final segment next week. You can subscribe to my RSS feed to receive this automatically.

Special thanks for Bruce Elgort and his clown friend, Brian Reed for contributing their time and talent to create the new intro and exit themes. Thanks guys!

An article that appeared in USA Today this week about the disappointing sales of university textbooks in digital form shows how uphill the battle can be for supporters of e-textbooks like Tracy Hooten and Eric Mack (among others). The article recounts how a Brown University student bought a textbook in digital format so he could save $30. How did he like the ebook format?

Thank you for doing the podcast about the 8 week challenge. I am considering going toward a paperless study practice upon entering medical school in the fall. I have one more quarter of coursework at UCSC and I am thinking of using that as a practice ground. A few questions have come up for me in listening to your podcast:

1) How do you and Tracy deal with textbooks that are in color with regards to scanning and creating a pdf version? Many biology texts have very helpful graphics that loose their usefulness in gray-scale.

2) Today, I used Adobe pro to OCR a reading that a professor had given me. This allowed me to highlight and to select text. As I could not get adobe to create a summary of the highlighted text as I thought I heard the guest speaker say was possible, I used the add a comment note feature to be able to add a comment - a cut and past of the text - so that I could create a summary at the end of the reading. Is there a better way?

3) Also on this same 20 PDF, in a few sections when I tried to select or highlight text, some of the text at the same level in the column on the right got selected as well (I was working with text in the left column of a 2 column document). Is there a setting to let Adobe know that it is a 2 column document?

4) Are there trail versions of one-note, go-binder, and mind-map available?